GSN Global Sensor Networks

GSN is a software middleware designed to facilitate the deployment and programming of sensor networks.

Online Documentation

You can find the latest GSN documentation, including a deployment, installation, and programming guide, on the project wiki. This README file only contains basic setup instructions.

Building from the sources

First download the code from the git repository (using --depth 1 makes it a lot smaller if you don't need the 10 years history):

git clone --depth 1 git@github.com:LSIR/gsn.git

GSN requires the following software for building:

Jakarta apache ant version 1.7.x or higher.
Java JDK 1.7.x .
Apache Maven

To build GSN follow these steps:

Add ANT_HOME/bin folder to your PATH
Execute ant with the build task: ant build

To run GSN from the source code, you can run the following ant task: ant gsn

To stop GSN: ant stop

Starting from version 1.1.7 GSN is using apache maven for managing the dependencies and libraries. If you use a IDE such as eclipse or NetBeans you may need to install additional plugins and change the settings of the project:

For eclipse:
- You can install M2Eclipse
- Right-click on your GSN project -> configure -> Convert to Maven project...
- Right-click on your GSN project -> Build Path -> Configure build path...
- On the libraries tab, remove all references to the libraries that are marked in red.
- Press alt+F5 and update the maven libraries (it may take a while the first time)
- If it still complains about missing libraries, check if they are in the lib folder and if needed add them to the build path

Multiplatform installer

We provide a multiplatform GSN Installer for each release of the code. This installer is the best way to easily try GSN features.

The installer binaries for the latest realease can be found at: https://github.com/LSIR/gsn/releases

Once GSN is installed, you can start it, executing the batch file gsn-start.bat (Windows) or shell script gsn-start.sh (Linux).

The GSN web interface is accessible at http://localhost:22001

NEW Debian package

To make it even easier to test on Linux or deploy at large scale, we provide with the latest version (1.1.8) a debian package (https://github.com/LSIR/gsn/releases/download/gsn-release-1.1.8/gsn_1.1.8_all.deb). It includes an init script to start the GSN server automatically at boot and manage it like any other service. For this first packaged version, we put all configuration files in /opt/gsn/1.1.8/conf/, the virtual sensors in /opt/gsn/1.1.8/virtual-sensors/ and the logs can be found at /var/log/gsn/. Starting and stopping GSN is performed with service gsn start/stop. By default, the GSN web interface is then accessible at http://localhost:22001, but you can change the port at installation time or later on, in the configuration file gsn.xml.

Loading your first virtual sensor

To load a virtual sensor into GSN, you need to move its description file (.xml) into the virtual-sensors directory. This directory contains a set of samples that can be used.

You can start by loading the MultiFormatTemperatureHandler virtual sensor (virtual-sensors/samples/multiFormatSample.xml). This virtual sensor generates random values without the need of an actual physical sensor.

Virtual sensors are visible in the GSN web interface: http://localhost:22001